Linux KVM vs. VirtualBox 4.0 Virtualization Benchmarks

Oracle's been vigorously working on their VM VirtualBox 4.0 software and in
just the past week they have delivered two
public betas that bring a number of new features. Among the changes there
is support for Intel HD audio / ICH9 to guest VMs, the concept of extension packs,
user-interface improvements, support for limiting a virtual machine's CPU time
and I/O bandwidth, 3D acceleration fixes for guests, and a great number of bug-fixes.
How though is this updated Oracle/Sun virtualization platform comparing to the older VirtualBox 3.2 release and
that of the upstream Linux KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) that most Linux distributions rely upon? Here are a number of benchmarks that seek to
answer this very question.

We have carried out a number of benchmarks under VirtualBox 3.2.12, VirtualBox
4.0 Beta 2, KVM in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, and atop the actual system's host operating
system. The tests we carried out in the four different configurations for looking
at the Linux virtualization performance were Apache, SQLite, PostMark, FS-Mark,
7-Zip, Parallel BZIP2, C-Ray, GnuPG, OpenSSL, Gcrypt, Ogg, x264, FFmpeg, TCP Network
Performance, timed Apache compilation under GCC, Bullet Physics Engine, and NAS
Parallel Benchmarks. All of these tests were managed and executed by the Phoronix
Test Suite.

The system used for this Linux virtualization benchmarking was based around
the new Intel Core i7 970
Gulftown processor with six physical threads plus Hyper Threading to provide
a logical count of 12 threads and a core clock of 3.20GHz. The motherboard was
an ASRock X58 SuperComputer with 3GB of system memory, a 320GB Seagate ST3320620AS
SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA GeForce
GTX 460 graphics card.

When running our automated virtualization tests under the different configurations
we allowed the guests access to all 12 processor threads and limited the VMs to
1.5GB of system RAM (per the maximum "optimal settings" under VirtualBox
for this system). The KVM testing was done with QEMU and Virt-Manager. The stock
settings besides that were used throughout the testing process and on the host
itself. The software stack on both the host and guests were Ubuntu 10.10 (x86_64)
with the Linux 2.6.35-22-generic kernel, GNOME 2.32.0, X.Org Server 1.9.0, GCC
4.4.5, and the EXT4 file-system. With the VirtualBox testing the respective "Guest
Additions" were installed for each release.

Without further ado, let us see how these virtualization systems compare.